Is Death March kara Hajimaru Isekai Kyousoukyoku the zenith of trash
isekai shows? Now dear reader I know that is a bold question, Overlord
exists afterall, however, while Overlord is truly trash, it is not as
dedicated to being insidous as Death March is.
Death March wants you to know that MC is a Nice Guy, not only is he a Nice
Guy he's superhumanly nice, he is the Stakhanovite drone in his shovelware
capitalist enterprise selflessly sacrificing his own physical and mental
health so one more ingame currency pack can get sold. MC is not a real
person, he's not a character you can emphasise
...
with, he's a surreal
masochistic cut out with godlike powers with some cult leader tenancies
who we are supposed to know is a Nice Guy because he doesn't exploit those
around him to the maximum extent that he can. It's also important to
remember that MC is consciously deceiving and manipulating everyone around
him at all times in fact one of the few moments where it tries to pretend
that everything is not going MC's way is when he is being manipulated by
an ability this loss of control is deeply unsettling to MC but there's no
exploration of it!
Also, he is a grown ass man deposited in the body of age undefined anime
teenager, although for some reason the show mentions that and then forgets
that it did it and doesn't bring it up again... In a similar vain at the very start we get a slight Grimgar-esq insight into life of a baddy mob, it doesn't bother revisiting this...
The show features no reflection on its own setting, MC is deposited in an
extremely dark place, chattel slavery is the norm and the church dispenses
horrific punishments without MC considering his environment for a moment.
There is the faintest of hint that MC at least thinks about the mechanics
of the church's persecutions, but it is on an entirely individual level
and confined (so far as I have seen into the show) to one scene in one
epsiode. If the show had any more of a hint of self-awareness I'd think
it was trying to make a point about desensitisation to traumatic
conditions but I think that's an overly generous reading.
The show is a grand tour of tired tropes and stock characters, there is no
chemistry between characters (indeed the central cast of characters are
quite literally MC's chattels). The show is so bad on these fronts that if
we ever got any of MC's internal monologue I could believe this was meant
as a critical deconstruction of a genre that's become a stale ouroboros. I
don't even want to dismiss that possibility, I want to hold on to the hope
that in the last episode we discover that MC had a complete mental
breakdown as a result of his horrid working conditions, but I can't really
imagine there's enough self-awareness in the show for that to be the case
(also you know a show is probably bad if you want the whole thing to be a
psychotic episode to forgive it its faults...).
Setting aside all of the trash, even taking the show on its own merits as
a adventure game romp it falls on its face, I can't quite grasp how we're
meant to suspend disbelief where there's no risk or danger in a game
environment where MC has access to the console, in fact in the moments that
it does do that I find myself perplexed as to why he doesn't just h4x his
way through whatever obstacle is in front of him. And as I said before
even if you pretend he doesn't own the googly eyed girls following him
around it's creepy and the shows constant reminders of how much of a Nice
Guy MC is makes it all the more creepy.
Re:Zero it ain't.
Perversely though, because of just how insidious it is I do recommend
watching it because it is a master-class in how not to do this.
Now I guess it's not impossible that come episode 12 we're going to see a Damascene moment where suddenly the show hurls itself open and examines the tiny little flags it dropped along the way and explores what it's been doing all this time but I find that extremely unlikely.
I think the above covers it but below are some spoilers on specific
instances of why this show is so unpleasant.
The desire to portray MC as a Nice Guy is truly maddening and so lacking
in self-awareness that... well... it's maddening. There's also the
generally bad writing and MC's completely unquestioning acceptance of the
world around him.
One of the early examples of this is when he first enters the town and
goes to an inn, he considers the woman who runs the inn "If she was 10...
20kg lighter I'd be all over that... but since she's fat I'm gonna creep
on her 14 year old daughter", not even kidding, that's our Nice Guy MC.
Shortly thereafter MC becomes a slave owner... shortly there after he buys
an 11 year old sex slave, not even kidding, the show tries to make this
okay by pretending that she's a grown woman who died in the real world and
was resurrected in this world as a child of a noble family who fell and so
she was enslaved and trained as a sex slave... MC is shown to be a Nice
Guy because he does not then have sex with her... instead he goes to a
brothel in a slave holding city. Like, we expect some pretty absurd male
power fantasy elements in harem anime but the dissonance here between the
constant presentation of how much of a Nice Guy MC is with *everything*
else in the show is jarring.
I really am struggling with this one to fathom the show's intent, why is it so keen to tell us that MC is a good guy with his head in a bubble?
Mar 17, 2018
Is Death March kara Hajimaru Isekai Kyousoukyoku the zenith of trash
isekai shows? Now dear reader I know that is a bold question, Overlord exists afterall, however, while Overlord is truly trash, it is not as dedicated to being insidous as Death March is. Death March wants you to know that MC is a Nice Guy, not only is he a Nice Guy he's superhumanly nice, he is the Stakhanovite drone in his shovelware capitalist enterprise selflessly sacrificing his own physical and mental health so one more ingame currency pack can get sold. MC is not a real person, he's not a character you can emphasise ... 
Nov 23, 2017
Shuumatsu Nani Shitemasu ka? Isogashii desu ka? Sukutte Moratte Ii desu ka?
There will be spoilers. This was a show which I put off watching for a long time because I expected it to be an emotionally punishing experience, I ended up watching it over the course of two (working) days and in the end it left me with one (long-winded) question: Is this show an earnest and cack-handed attempt to deliver a tragic tale of redemption through the salvation of others or is it a brazenly cynical and exploitative mashup of stock tropes and pre-packed themes that are verging on the Pavlovian? So, what is this show? ... 
Feb 14, 2017
I must confess to being a bit mystified as to why both the first and second season of this show have been so warmly received, imagine Log Horizon with none of the things that make Log Horizon good and a liberal sprinkling of common or garden variety shounen ecchi and that's KonoSuba.
The characters are stock and static, the dynamics between them are stock and static, the plot so far as it has a plot as opposed to just a setting has been done a dozen times before and even on its own terms it wears its gags threadbare (oh look, the cast have been eaten ... |
